If all went well, you will now see that the PHPCompatibility, PHPCompatibilityJoomla and several other PHPCompatibility standards are installed for PHP_CodeSniffer.

How to use

Now you can use the following command to inspect your code:

./vendor/bin/phpcs -p . --standard=PHPCompatibilityJoomla

By default, you will only receive notifications about deprecated and/or removed PHP features.

To get the most out of the PHPCompatibilityJoomla standard, you should specify a testVersion to check against. That will enable the checks for both deprecated/removed PHP features as well as the detection of code using new PHP features.

The minimum PHP requirement of the Joomla project at this time is PHP 5.3.10. If you want to enforce this, either add --runtime-set testVersion 5.3- to your command-line command or add <config name="testVersion" value="5.3-"/> to your custom ruleset.

For example:

# For a project which should be compatible with PHP 5.3 and higher:
./vendor/bin/phpcs -p . --standard=PHPCompatibilityJoomla --runtime-set testVersion 5.3-

For more detailed information about setting the testVersion, see the README of the generic PHPCompatibility standard.

Testing PHP files only

By default PHP_CodeSniffer will analyse PHP, JavaScript and CSS files. As the PHPCompatibility sniffs only target PHP code, you can make the run slightly faster by telling PHP_CodeSniffer to only check PHP files, like so:

License

Changelog

2.1.0 - 2018-12-16

Ruleset: Updated for the PHP 7.1 polyfill which is included in Joomla 3.9.

The ruleset is now also tested against PHP 7.3.
Note: full PHP 7.3 support is only available in combination with PHP_CodeSniffer 2.9.2 or 3.3.1+ due to an incompatibility within PHP_CodeSniffer itself.